Overdrive Finals: More Day 1 Impressions

Introduction

WR Team France had a late start, as one team member arrived late. However, they got some support by the Kingston representatives and they managed to get top scores in SuperPI 32M and PIFast - both are still valid at Sunday 11 AM. But there are still five more hours, so the race remains tight.

Italy: Turning Frustration Into A Challenge

The Italian team seemed to be frustrated. They didn't reach the clock speeds they were looking for, and as a result, they weren't hitting very impressive scores. But they kept trying, and things are looking better for them, as they still hold the records in SuperPI 1M, wPrime 1024M, and 3DMark01.

Blowing Off Steam

Whether you're successful or not, you need to take a break once in a while. Although it doesn't look like it, overclocking on liquid nitrogen is an intense job.

Maintaining The Ideal CPU Temperature

Massimilliano from the MemoryExtreme Team Italy has an eye on the CPU temperature, which is extremely important. Cooling the processor down too much might result in a so-called cold bug, which causes the CPU to literally freeze, and it will stop working for a while. As you'd be losing time, you want to avoid this.

Core i7 is much more sensitive than Core 2 it seems, so a 20°C temperature difference might be outside of the ideal temperature operating range. According to various teams, the ideal operating range is at around -95°C and -100°C.

Taiwan: Get Us Some Salt!

Taiwan's team CBB had a rather strange request. They asked us to get some salt. The reason behind this can be seen on the photo. As we mentioned yesterday, the guys utilize a water cooling solution for the graphics card, and they have been pouring liquid nitrogen into the water reservoir to reduce the water temperature. However, the water would of course start to freeze once it reaches 0°C. Adding salt is a simple and effective way to move the freezing temperature further down. This introduces additional margins for cooling.

Tom's Hardware Tracking Scores

Julien and Tristan from Tom's Hardware France are discussing the results, which we tracked on paper and on a notebook. We projected them to one of the office's walls so that everybody is up to date throughout the competition.

Pizza And...Fruit?

Almost everyone likes pizza, so we decided to keep it simple and ordered a nice little stack of them. We added some healthier snacks to the mix as well. Everyone knows you can't overclock well without your daily allotment of vitamins.

Liquid Nitrogen Refills

We had multiple 25-liter canisters, which we used to refill liquid nitrogen from a larger tank located close by.

Italy: Results!

Italy shoots, Italy scores. As you can see, Massimiliano is happy now.

Day 1 Evening Scores

At the end of day 1, only the Taiwanese team submitted results in all benchmark categories. As you can see, the playing field is rather even.